sábado, 7 de julio de 2018

A New Revolution in Mexico

Proclaiming
a “people’s struggle” against the country’s “power mafia,” Andrés
Manuel López Obrador is regularly mobbed on the Presidential campaign
trail.Photograph by Meghan Dhaliwal for The New Yorker

The
first time that Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for President of Mexico,
in 2006, he inspired such devotion among his partisans that they
sometimes stuck notes in his pockets, inscribed with their hopes for
their families. In an age defined by globalism, he was an advocate of
the working class—and also a critic of the PRI, the party that has
ruthlessly dominated national politics for much of the past century. In
the election, his voters’ fervor was evidently not enough; he lost, by a
tiny margin. The second time he ran, in 2012, the enthusiasm was the
same, and so was the outcome. Now, though, Mexico is in crisis—beset
from inside by corruption and drug violence, and from outside by the
antagonism of the Trump Administration. There are new Presidential
elections on July 1st, and López Obrador is running on a promise to
remake Mexico in the spirit of its founding revolutionaries. If the
polls can be believed, he is almost certain to win.

In March, he
held a meeting with hundreds of loyalists, at a conference hall in
Culiacán. López Obrador, known across Mexico as AMLO, is a rangy man of
sixty-four, with a youthful, clean-shaven face, a mop of silver hair,
and an easy gait. When he entered, his supporters got to their feet and
chanted, “It’s an honor to vote for López Obrador!” Many of them were
farmworkers, wearing straw hats and scuffed boots. He urged them to
install Party observers at polling stations to prevent fraud, but
cautioned against buying votes, a long-established habit of the PRI.
“That’s what we’re getting rid of,” he said. He promised a “sober,
austere government—a government without privilege.” López Obrador
frequently uses “privilege” as a term of disparagement, along with
“élite,” and, especially, “power mafia,” as he describes his enemies in
the political and business communities. “We are going to lower the
salaries of those who are on top to increase the salaries of those on
the bottom,” he said, and added a Biblical assurance: “Everything I am
saying will be done.” López Obrador spoke in a warm voice, leaving long
pauses and using simple phrases that ordinary people would understand.
He has a penchant for rhymes and repeated slogans, and at times the
crowd joined in, like fans at a pop concert. When he said, “We don’t
want to help the power mafia to . . . ,” a man in the audience finished
his sentence: “keep stealing.” Working together, López Obrador said, “we
are going to make history.”

The current Mexican government is led by the center-right President Enrique Peña Nieto.
His party, the PRI, has depicted López Obrador as a radical populist,
in the tradition of Hugo Chávez, and warned that he intends to turn
Mexico into another Venezuela. The Trump Administration has been
similarly concerned. Roberta Jacobson, who until last month was the U.S.
Ambassador to Mexico, told me that senior American officials often
expressed worry: “They catastrophized about AMLO, saying things like ‘If
he wins, the worst will happen.’ ”

Ironically, his surging
popularity can be attributed partly to Donald Trump. Within days of
Trump’s election, Mexican political analysts were predicting that his
open belligerence toward Mexico would encourage political resistance.
Mentor Tijerina, a prominent pollster in Monterrey, told me at the time,
“Trump’s arrival signifies a crisis for Mexico, and this will help
AMLO.” Not long after the Inauguration, López Obrador published a
best-selling book called “Oye, Trump”
(“Listen Up, Trump”), which contained tough-talking snippets from his
speeches. In one, he declared, “Trump and his advisers speak of the
Mexicans the way Hitler and the Nazis referred to the Jews, just before
undertaking the infamous persecution and the abominable extermination.”

Officials
in the Peña Nieto government warned their counterparts in the White
House that Trump’s offensive behavior heightened the prospect of a
hostile new government—a national-security threat just across the
border. If Trump didn’t modulate his behavior, the election would be a
referendum on which candidate was the most anti-American. In the U.S.,
the warnings worked. During a Senate hearing in April, 2017, John McCain
said, “If the election were tomorrow in Mexico, you would probably get a
left-wing, anti-American President.” John Kelly, who was then the
Homeland Security chief, agreed. “It would not be good for America—or
for Mexico,” he said.

In Mexico, remarks like Kelly’s seemed only
to improve López Obrador’s standing. “Every time an American politician
opens their mouth to express a negative view about a Mexican candidate,
it helps him,” Jacobson said. But she has never been sure that Trump
has the same “apocalyptic” view of AMLO. “There are certain traits they
share,” she noted. “The populism, for starters.” During the campaign,
López Obrador has decried Mexico’s “pharaonic government” and promised
that, if he is elected, he will decline to live in Los Pinos, the
Presidential residence. Instead, he will open it to the public, as a
place for ordinary families to go and enjoy themselves.

After
Jacobson arrived in Mexico, in 2016, she arranged meetings with local
political leaders. López Obrador kept her waiting for months. Finally,
he invited her to his home, in a distant, unfashionable corner of Mexico
City. “I had the impression he did that because he didn’t think I would
come,” she said. “But I told him, ‘No problem, my security guys can
make that work.’ ” Jacobson’s team followed his directions to an
unremarkable two-story town house in Tlalpan, a middle-class district.
“If part of the point was to show me how modestly he lived, he
succeeded,” she said.

López Obrador was “friendly and confident,”
she said, but he deflected many of her questions and spoke vaguely
about policy. The conversation did little to settle the issue of whether
he was an opportunistic radical or a principled reformer. “What should
we expect from him as President?” she said. “Honestly, my strongest
feeling about him is that we don’t know what to expect.”

This
spring, as López Obrador and his advisers travelled the country, I
joined them on several trips. On the road, his style is strikingly
different from that of most national politicians, who often arrive at
campaign stops in helicopters and move through the streets surrounded by
security details. López Obrador flies coach, and travels from town to
town in a two-car caravan, with drivers who double as unarmed
bodyguards; he has no other security measures in place, except for
inconsistent efforts to obscure which hotel he is staying in. On the
street, people approach him constantly to ask for selfies, and he greets
them all with equanimity, presenting a warm, slightly inscrutable
façade. “AMLO is like an abstract painting—you see what you want to see
in him,” Luis Miguel González, the editorial director of the newspaper
El Economista, told me. One of his characteristic gestures during
speeches is to demonstrate affection by hugging himself and leaning
toward the crowd.

Jacobson recalled that, after Trump was
elected, López Obrador lamented, “Mexicans will never elect someone who
is not a politician.” This was telling, she thought. “He is clearly a
politician,” she said. “But, like Trump, he has always presented himself
as an outsider.” He was born in 1953, to a family of shopkeepers in
Tabasco state, in a village called Tepetitán. Tabasco, on the Gulf of
Mexico, is bisected by rivers that regularly flood its towns; in both
its climate and the feistiness of its local politics, it can resemble
Louisiana. One observer recalled that López Obrador joked, “Politics is a
perfect blend of passion and reason. But I’m tabasqueño, a hundred per
cent passion!” His nickname, El Peje, is derived from
pejelagarto—Tabasco’s freshwater gar, an ancient, primitive fish with a
face like an alligator’s.

When López Obrador was a boy, his
family moved to the state capital, Villahermosa. Later, in Mexico City,
he studied political science and public policy at UNAM, the country’s
premier state-funded university, writing his thesis about the political
formation of the Mexican state, in the nineteenth century. He married
Rocío Beltrán Medina, a sociology student from Tabasco, and they had
three sons. Elena Poniatowska, the doyenne of Mexican journalism,
recalls meeting him when he was a young man. “He has always been very
determined to get to the Presidency,” she said. “Like an arrow, straight
and unswerving.”“Chicken on a bed of spinach and onions?”

For
a person with political aspirations, the PRI was then the only serious
option. It had been founded in 1929, to restore the country after the
revolution. In the thirties, President Lázaro Cárdenas solidified it as
an inclusive party of socialist change; he nationalized the oil industry
and provided millions of acres of farmland to the poor and the
dispossessed. Over the decades, the Party’s ideology fluctuated, but its
hold on power steadily grew. Presidents chose their successors, in a
ritual called the dedazo, and the Party made sure that they were
elected.

López Obrador joined the PRI after college, and, in
1976, he helped direct a successful Senate campaign for Carlos Pellicer,
a poet who was friends with Pablo Neruda and Frida Kahlo. López Obrador
rose quickly; he spent five years running the Tabasco office of the
National Indigenous Institute, and then leading a department of the
National Consumer Institute, in Mexico City. But he felt increasingly
that the Party had strayed from its roots. In 1988, he joined a
left-wing breakaway group, led by Lázaro Cárdenas’s son, that grew into
the Partido Revolucionario Democrático. López Obrador became the Party
chief in Tabasco.

In 1994, he made his first attempt at electoral
office, running for governor of the state. He lost to the PRI’s
candidate, whom he accused of having won through fraud. Although a court
inquiry did not lead to a verdict, many Mexicans believed him; the PRI
has a long record of rigging elections. Soon after the election, a
supporter handed López Obrador a box of receipts, showing that the PRI
had spent ninety-five million dollars on an election in which half a
million people voted.

In 2000, he was elected mayor of Mexico
City, a post that gave him considerable power, as well as national
visibility. In office, he built a reputation as a rumpled everyman; he
drove an old Nissan to work, arriving before sunrise, and he reduced his
own salary. (When his wife died, of lupus, in 2003, there was an
outpouring of sympathy.) He was not averse to political combat. After
one of his officials was caught on tape seeming to accept a bribe, he
argued that it was a sting, and distributed comic books that depicted
himself fighting against “dark forces.” (The official was later
cleared.) At times, López Obrador ignored his assembly and governed by
edict. But he also proved able to compromise. He succeeded in creating a
pension fund for elderly residents, expanding highways to ease
congestion, and devising a public-private scheme, with the
telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim, to restore the historic
downtown.

When he left office to prepare for the 2006
Presidential elections, he had high approval ratings and a reputation
for getting things done. (He also had a new wife, a historian named
Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller; they now have an eleven-year-old son.) López
Obrador saw an opportunity. In the last election, the PRI had lost its
long hold on power, as the Partido de Acción Nacional won the
Presidency. The PAN, a traditionalist conservative party, had support
from the business community, but its candidate, Felipe Calderón, was an
uncharismatic figure.

The campaign was hard fought. López
Obrador’s opponents ran television ads that presented him as a deceitful
populist who posed “a danger for Mexico” and showed images of human
misery alongside portraits of Chávez, Fidel Castro, and Evo Morales. In
the end, López Obrador lost by half of one per cent of the vote—a margin
slim enough to raise widespread suspicions of fraud. Refusing to
recognize Calderón’s win, he led a protest in the capital, where his
followers stopped traffic, erected tented encampments, and held rallies
in the historic Zócalo and along Reforma Avenue. One resident recalled
his giving speeches in “language that was reminiscent of the French
Revolution.” At one point, he conducted a parallel inauguration ceremony
in which his supporters swore him in as President. The protests lasted
months, and the residents of Mexico City grew impatient; eventually,
López Obrador packed up and went home.

In the 2012 election, he
won a third of the vote—not enough to defeat Peña Nieto, who returned
the PRI to power. But Peña Nieto’s government has been tarnished by
corruption and human-rights scandals. Ever since Trump announced his
candidacy with a burst of anti-Mexican rhetoric, Peña Nieto has tried to
placate him, with embarrassing results. He invited Trump to Mexico
during his campaign and treated him as if he were already a head of
state, only to have him return to the U.S. and tell a crowd of
supporters that Mexico would “pay for the wall.” After Trump was
elected, Peña Nieto assigned his foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, who
is a friend of Jared Kushner’s, to make managing the White House
relationship his highest priority. “Peña Nieto has been extremely
accommodating,” Jorge Guajardo, a former Mexican Ambassador to China,
told me. “There’s nothing Trump has even hinted at that he won’t
immediately comply with.”

In early March, before López
Obrador’s campaign had officially begun, we travelled through northern
Mexico, where resistance to him is concentrated. His base of support is
in the poorer, more agrarian south, with its majority indigenous
population. The north, near the border with Texas, is more conservative,
tied both economically and culturally to the southern United States;
his task there was not so different from presenting himself to the
Houston Chamber of Commerce.

In speeches, he tried to make light
of his opponents’ accusations, cracking jokes about receiving “gold from
Russia in a submarine” and calling himself “Andrés Manuelovich.” In
Delicias, an agricultural hub in Chihuahua, he swore not to overextend
his term in office. “I’m going to work sixteen hours a day instead of
eight, so I will do twelve years’ work in six years,” he said. This
rhetoric was backed by more pragmatic measures. As he travelled through
the north, he was accompanied by Alfonso (Poncho) Romo, a wealthy
businessman from the industrial boomtown of Monterrey, whom López
Obrador had selected as his future chief of staff. A close adviser told
me, “Poncho is key to the campaign in the north. Poncho is the bridge.”
In Guadalajara, López Obrador told the audience, “Poncho is with me to
help convince the businessmen who have been told we’re like Venezuela,
or with the Russians, that we want to expropriate property, and that
we’re populist. But none of that is true—this is a government made in
Mexico.”

At a lunch with businessmen in Culiacán, the capital of
Sinaloa state, López Obrador tested some ideas. “What we want to do is
to carry out the transformation that this country needs,” he began.
“Things can’t go on as they are.” He spoke in a conversational tone, and
the crowd gradually seemed to grow more sympathetic. “We’re going to
end the corruption, the impunity, and the privileges enjoyed by a small
élite,” he said. “Once we do, the leaders of this country can recover
their moral and political authority. And we’ll also clean up the image
of Mexico in the rest of the world, because right now all that Mexico is
known for is violence and corruption.”

López Obrador spoke about
helping the poor, but when he talked about corruption he focussed on
the political class. “Five million pesos a month in pension for
ex-Presidents!” he said, and grimaced. “All of that has to end.” He
noted that there were hundreds of Presidential jets and helicopters, and
said, “We’re going to sell them to Trump.” The audience laughed, and he
added, “We’ll use the money from the sale for public investment, and
thus foment private investment to generate employment.”

During
these early events, López Obrador was adjusting his message as he went
along. His campaign strategy seemed simple: make lots of promises and
broker whatever alliances were necessary to get elected. Just as he
promised his Party faithful to raise workers’ salaries at the expense of
senior bureaucrats, he promised the businessmen not to increase taxes
on fuel, medicine, or electricity, and vowed that he would never
confiscate property. “We will do nothing that goes against freedoms,” he
declared. He proposed establishing a thirty-kilometre duty-free zone
along the entire northern border, and lowering taxes for companies, both
Mexican and American, that set up factories there. He also offered
government patronage, vowing to complete an unfinished dam project in
Sinaloa and to provide agricultural subsidies. “The term ‘subsidy’ has
been satanized,” he said. “But it is necessary. In the United States
they do it—up to a hundred per cent of the cost of production.”

Culiacán
is a former stronghold of the brutal Sinaloa cartel, which has been
instrumental in the flood of drug-related violence and corruption that
has subsumed the Mexican state. Since 2006, the country has pursued a
“war on drugs” that has cost at least a hundred thousand lives,
seemingly to little good effect. López Obrador, like his opponents, has
struggled to articulate a viable security strategy.

After the
lunch in Culiacán, he took questions, and a woman stood to ask what he
intended to do about narcotrafficking. Would he consider the
legalization of drugs as a solution? A few months earlier, he had said,
seemingly without much deliberation, that he might offer an “amnesty” to
bring low-level dealers and producers into legal employment. When
critics leaped on his remark, his aides tried to deflect criticism by
arguing that, because none of the current administration’s policies had
worked, anything was worth trying. To the woman in Culiacán, he said,
“We’re going to tackle the causes with youth programs, new employment
opportunities, education, and by tending to the abandoned countryside.
We’re not only going to use force. We’ll analyze everything and explore
all the avenues that will let us achieve peace. I don’t rule out
anything, not even legalization—nothing.” The crowd applauded, and AMLO
looked relieved.

For López Obrador’s opponents, his ability
to inspire hope is worrisome. Enrique Krauze, a historian and
commentator who has often criticized the left, told me, “He reaches
directly into the religious sensibilities of the people. They are seeing
him as a man who will save Mexico from all of its evils. Even more
important, he believes it, too.”

Krauze has been concerned about
López Obrador ever since 2006. Before the Presidential elections that
year, he published an essay titled “The Tropical Messiah,” in which he
wrote that AMLO had a religious zeal that was “puritanical, dogmatic,
authoritarian, inclined toward hatred, and above all, redemptory.”
Krauze’s latest book—“El Pueblo Soy Yo,”
or “I Am the People”—is about the dangers of populism. He examines the
political cultures in modern Venezuela and Cuba, and also includes a
scathing assessment of Donald Trump, whom he refers to as “Caligula on
Twitter.” In the preface, he writes about López Obrador in a tone of
oracular dismay. “I believe that, if he wins, he will use his charisma
to promise a return to an Arcadian order,” he says. “And with that
accumulated power, arrived at thanks to democracy, he will corrode
democracy from within.”

What worried Krauze, he explained, was
that if López Obrador’s party won big—not just the Presidency but also a
majority in Congress, which the polls suggest is likely—he might move
to change the composition of the Supreme Court and dominate other
institutions. He could also exercise tighter control over the media,
much of which is supported by state-sponsored advertising. “Will he ruin
Mexico?” Krauze asked. “No, but he could obstruct Mexico’s democracy by
removing its counterweights. We’ve had a democratic experiment for the
past eighteen years, ever since the PRI first lost power, in 2000. It is
imperfect, there is much to criticize, but there have also been
positive changes. I’m worried that with AMLO this experiment might end.”

Over
dinner in Culiacán one night, López Obrador picked at a steak taco and
talked about his antagonists on the right, alternating between amusement
and concern. A few days earlier, Roberta Jacobson had announced that
she was stepping down as Ambassador, and the Mexican government had
immediately endorsed a prospective replacement: Edward Whitacre, a
former C.E.O. of General Motors who happened to be a friend of the
tycoon Carlos Slim. This was a nettlesome point for López Obrador. He
had recently argued with Slim over a multibillion-dollar plan for a new
Mexico City airport, which Slim was involved in. The scheme was a
public-private venture with Peña Nieto’s government, and López Obrador,
alleging corruption, had promised to stop it. (The government denies any
malfeasance.) “We are hoping it doesn’t mean they are planning to
interfere against me,” López Obrador said, of Whitacre and Slim.
“Millions of Mexicans would take offense at that.”

Recently, the Peruvian novelist and politician Mario Vargas Llosa—who
serves as an oracle for the Latin American right—had said publicly that
if AMLO won office it would be “a tremendous setback for democracy in
Mexico.” He added that he hoped the country would not commit “suicide”
on Election Day. When I mentioned the remarks, López Obrador grinned and
said that Vargas Llosa was in the news mostly for his marriage to “a
woman who always married up, and was always in Hola! magazine.” He was
referring to the socialite Isabel Preysler, a former wife of the singer
Julio Iglesias, for whom Vargas Llosa had abandoned his marriage of
fifty years. López Obrador asked if I’d seen his response, in which he’d
called Vargas Llosa a good writer and a bad politician. “You notice,”
he said wickedly, “I didn’t call him a great writer.”

On
April 1st, López Obrador officially launched his campaign, before a
crowd of several thousand people in Ciudad Juárez. On a stage set up in a
plaza, he stood with his wife, Beatríz, and several of his cabinet
picks. “We have come here to initiate our campaign, in the place where
our fatherland begins,” he said. The stage stood under a grand statue of
Mexico’s revered nineteenth-century leader Benito Juárez, an avowed
hero of López Obrador’s. Juárez, a man of humble Zapotec origins who
championed the cause of the disenfranchised, is a kind of Abraham
Lincoln figure in Mexico—an emblem of unbending honor and persistence.
Looking at the statue, López Obrador said that Juárez was “the best
President Mexico ever had.”

In López Obrador’s speech, he likened
the current administration to the despots and colonists who had
controlled the country before the revolution. He attacked the “colossal
dishonesty” that he said had characterized the “neoliberal” policies of
Mexico’s last few governments. “The country’s leaders have devoted
themselves . . . to concessioning off the national territory,” he said.
With his Presidency, the government would “cease to be a factory that
produces Mexico’s nouveaux riches.”

López
Obrador often speaks of admiring leaders from the
nineteen-thirties—including F.D.R. and the PRI head Lázaro Cárdenas—and
much of his social program recalls the initiatives of those years. In
his launch speech, he said that he intended to develop the south of the
country, where the agricultural economy has been devastated by
inexpensive U.S. food imports. To do this, he proposed to plant millions
of trees for fruit and timber, and to build a high-speed tourist train
that would connect the beaches of the Yucatán Peninsula with Mayan ruins
inland. The tree-planting project alone would create four hundred
thousand jobs, he predicted. With these initiatives, he said, people in
the south would be able to stay in their villages and not have to travel
north for work.

Across the country, he would encourage
construction projects that used hand tools rather than modern machinery,
in order to boost the economy in rural communities. Pensions for the
elderly would double. There would be free Internet in Mexico’s schools,
and in its public spaces. Young people would be guaranteed scholarships,
and then jobs after graduation. He wanted “becarios sí, sicarios
no”—scholarship students, not contract killers.

For many
audiences, especially in the south, these proposals are appealingly
simple. When López Obrador is asked how he will pay for them, he tends
to offer a similarly seductive answer. “It’s not a problem!” he said, in
one speech. “There is money. What there is is corruption, and we’re
going to stop it.” By getting rid of official corruption, he has
calculated, Mexico could save ten per cent of its national budget.
Corruption is a major issue for López Obrador. Marcelo Ebrard, his chief
political aide, says that his ethics are informed by a “Calvinist
streak,” and even some skeptics have been persuaded of his sincerity.
Cassio Luiselli, a longtime Mexican diplomat, told me, “I don’t like his
authoritarian streak and confrontational style.” But, he added, “he
seems to me to be an honest man, which is a lot to say in these parts.”

López
Obrador has vowed that his first bill to Congress would amend an
article in the constitution that prevents sitting Mexican Presidents
from being tried for corruption. This would be a symbolic deterrent, but
an insufficient one; in order to root out corruption, he’d have to
purge huge swaths of the government. Last year, the former governor of
Chihuahua, charged with embezzlement, fled to the U.S., where he is
evading efforts at extradition. More than a dozen other current and
former state governors have faced criminal investigations. The attorney
general who led some of those inquiries was himself reported to have a
Ferrari registered in his name at an unoccupied house in a different
state, and, though his lawyer argued that it was an administrative
error, he resigned not long afterward. The former head of the national
oil company has been accused of taking millions of dollars in bribes.
(He denies this.) Peña Nieto, who ran as a reformer, was involved in a
scandal in which his wife obtained a luxurious house from a developer
with connections to the government; later, his administration was
accused of using spyware to eavesdrop on opponents. According to
reporting in the Times, state prosecutors have declined to pursue
damning evidence against PRI officials, to avoid harming the Party’s
electoral chances.

With every major party implicated in
corruption, López Obrador’s supporters seem to care less about the
practicality of his ideas than about his promises to fix a broken
government. Emiliano Monge, a prominent novelist and essayist, said,
“This election really began to cease being political a few months ago
and became emotional. It is more than anything a referendum against
corruption, in which, as much by right as by cleverness, AMLO has
presented himself as the only alternative. And in reality he is.”

For
months, López Obrador’s team crisscrossed the country. Arriving in a
tiny cow town called Guadalupe Victoria, he told me that he had been
there twenty times. After a long day of speeches and meetings in
Sinaloa, we had dinner as he prepared to travel to Tijuana, where he had
a similar agenda the next day. He looked a little weary, and I asked if
he was planning a break. He nodded, and told me that, during Easter,
he’d go to Palenque, in the southern state of Chiapas, where he had a
ranchito in the jungle. “I go there and don’t come out again for three
or four days,” he said. “I just look at the trees.”

For the most
part, though, communing with the crowds seemed to energize him. In
Delicias, it took him twenty minutes to walk a single block, as
supporters pressed in for selfies and kisses and held up banners that
read “AMLOVE”—one of his campaign slogans. Appearances with his
opponents and encounters with the media suit him less. At times, he has
responded to forceful questions from reporters with a wave of his
pinkie—in Mexico, a peremptory no. In 2006, he declined to attend the
first Presidential debate; his opponents left an empty chair for him
onstage.

There were three debates scheduled for this campaign
season, and they were AMLO’s to lose. By May 20th, when the second one
was held, in Tijuana, polls said that he had an estimated forty-nine per
cent of the vote. His nearest rival—Ricardo Anaya, a
thirty-nine-year-old lawyer who is the PAN candidate—had twenty-eight
per cent. José Antonio Meade, who had served Peña Nieto as finance
secretary and foreign secretary, trailed with twenty-one. In last place,
with two per cent, was Jaime Rodríguez Calderón, the governor of the
state of Nuevo León. An intemperate tough guy known as El Bronco, he has
made his mark on the campaign by suggesting that corrupt officials
should have their hands chopped off.

With López Obrador in the
lead, his opponents’ debate strategy was to make him look defensive, and
at times it worked. At one point, Anaya, a small man with the buzz-cut
hair and frameless glasses of a tech entrepreneur, walked across the
stage to confront López Obrador. At first, AMLO reacted mildly. He
reached for his pocket and exclaimed, “I’m going to protect my wallet.”
The mood lightened. But when Anaya challenged him on one favorite
initiative, a train line connecting the Caribbean and the Pacific, he
was so affronted that he called Anaya a canalla, a scoundrel. He went
on, using the diminutive form of Anaya’s first name to create a rhyming
ditty that poked fun at his stature: “Ricky, riquín, canallín.”

When
Meade, the PRI candidate, criticized López Obrador’s party for voting
against a trade agreement, AMLO replied that the debate was merely an
excuse to attack him. “It’s obvious, and, I would say, understandable,”
he said. “We are leading by twenty-five points in the polls.” Otherwise,
he hardly bothered to look Meade’s way, except to wave dismissively at
him and Anaya and call them representatives of “the power mafia.”

Nevertheless,
his lead in polls only grew. Two days later, in the resort town of
Puerto Vallarta, thousands of fans surrounded his white S.U.V., holding
it in place until police opened a pathway. On social media, video clips
circulated of well-wishers bending down to kiss his car.

Ever
since he lost the election of 2006, López Obrador has presented himself
as an avatar of change. He founded a new party, the National
Regeneration Movement, or MORENA, which Duncan Wood, the director of the
Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center, described as evocative of the
early PRI—an effort to sweep up everyone who felt that Mexico had gone
astray. “He went around the country signing agreements with people,”
Wood said. “ ‘Do you want to be part of a change? Yes? Then sign here.’ ”
MORENA has an increasing number of sympathizers but relatively few
official members; last year, it had three hundred and twenty thousand,
making it the country’s fourth-largest party. As López Obrador’s
campaign has gathered strength, he has welcomed partners that seem
profoundly incompatible. In December, MORENA forged a coalition with the
P.T., a party with Maoist origins; it also joined with the PES, an
evangelical Christian party that opposes same-sex marriage,
homosexuality, and abortion. Some of his aides intimate that López
Obrador could sever these ties after he wins, but not everyone is
convinced. “What terrifies me most are his political alliances,” Luis
Miguel González, of El Economista, told me.

At a rally in the
town of Gómez Palacio, some of these alliances collided messily. In an
open-air market on the edge of town, P.T. partisans occupied a large
area near the stage—an organized bloc of young men wearing red T-shirts
and waving flags with yellow stars. Onstage with López Obrador was the
Party’s chief, Beto Anaya. One of López Obrador’s aides winced visibly
and grumbled, “That guy has quite a few corruption scandals.” (Anaya
denies accusations against him.) As local leaders gathered, a young
woman walked to the microphone, and boos erupted from the crowd. The
aide explained that the woman was Alma Marina Vitela, a MORENA candidate
who had formerly been with the PRI. The booing gathered strength, and
Vitela stood frozen, looking at the crowd, seemingly unable to speak.
López Obrador strode over, put his arm around her, and took the
microphone. “We need to leave our differences and conflicts behind,” he
said. The booing quickly stopped. “The fatherland is first!” he shouted,
and cheers broke out.

With the P.T. partisans in the audience,
López Obrador’s speech took on a distinctly more radical edge. “This
party is an instrument for the people’s struggle,” he said, and added,
“In union there is strength.” He went on, “Mexico will produce
everything it consumes. We will stop buying from abroad.” After each of
his points, the P.T. militants cheered in unison, and someone banged a
drum.

Over dinner that night, we spoke about MORENA’s prospects.
López Obrador boasted that, although the party remains considerably
smaller than its rivals, it was able to reliably mobilize partisans.
“There are few movements on the left in Latin America with the power to
put people on the street anymore,” he said.

Not long before, a
prominent Communist leader in the region had told me that the Latin
American left was largely dead, because there were almost no unions
anymore. Unions were once a powerhouse of regional politics, supplying
credibility and votes; in recent decades, many have succumbed to
corruption or internal divisions, or have been co-opted by business
owners. López Obrador smiled when I mentioned it. The largest Mexican
miners’ union had recently offered to support his campaign. In 2006, the
head of the union, Napoleón Gómez Urrutia, was charged with trying to
embezzle a workers’ trust fund of fifty-five million dollars; he fled to
Canada, where he obtained citizenship and wrote a best-selling book
about his travails. In López Obrador’s telling, he had been punished for
taking on mine owners. “They own everything, and they call the shots,”
he said.

Urrutia was exonerated in 2014, but he still felt that
he was vulnerable to new charges if he returned. López Obrador took up
his cause, offering him a seat in the Senate, which would provide him
immunity from prosecution. López Obrador’s critics were enraged. “You
should have seen the outcry!” he said. “They really attacked me. But
it’s dying down again now.” With a mocking look, he said, “I told them
that, if the Canadians thought he was fine, then maybe he wasn’t so bad
after all.” Rolling his eyes, he said, “You know, here they think the
Canadians are all things good.”

López Obrador told me that he
also had the backing of the teachers’ union, then hastened to clarify:
“The unofficial one—not the corrupted official one.” Peña Nieto’s
government had passed educational reforms, and the measures had been
unpopular with teachers. “They are now with us,” he said, then added,
“The official—compromised, corrupted—teachers’ union has also given me
its support.” He grimaced. “This is the kind of support one doesn’t
really need, but in a campaign you need support, so we will go forward,
and hope to find ways to clean them up.”

A few weeks later, I
rejoined López Obrador on the road in Chihuahua, Mexico’s biggest
state. South of Ciudad Juárez and its dusty belt of low-wage factories,
Chihuahua is cowboy country—a wide-open place of vast prairies and
forested mountains. For several days, we drove hundreds of miles back
and forth through the rangelands.

This territory had once been a
base for Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army in its fight against the
dictator Porfirio Díaz; the landscape was dotted with the sites of
battles and mass executions. One day, outside a men’s bathroom at a rest
stop, López Obrador looked out at the plain, waved his arms, and said,
“Villa and his men marched all through these parts for years. But just
imagine the difference: he and his men covered most of these miles by
horse, while we’re in cars.”

López Obrador has written half a
dozen books on Mexico’s political history. Even more than most Mexicans,
he is aware of the country’s history of subjugation and sensitive to
its echoes in the rhetoric of the Trump Administration. When we stopped
for lunch at a modest restaurant off the highway, he spoke of the
invasion of 1846, known in the U.S. as the Mexican-American War and in
Mexico as the United States’ Intervention in Mexico. That conflict ended
with the humiliating cession of more than half the nation’s territory
to the United States, but López Obrador saw in it at least a few
examples of valor. At one point during the war, he said, Commodore
Matthew Perry arrayed a huge U.S. fleet off the coast of Veracruz. “He
had overwhelming superiority, and sent word to the commander of the town
to surrender so as to save the city and its people,” he said. “And you
know what the commander told Perry? ‘My balls are too big to fit into
your Capitol building. Get it on.’ And so Perry opened fire, and
devastated Veracruz.” López Obrador laughed. “But pride was saved.” For a
moment, he mused about whether victory was more important than a grand
gesture that could mean defeat. Finally, he said he believed that the
grand gesture was important—“for history’s sake, if for nothing else.”

We
were interrupted by members of the family that ran the restaurant,
politely asking for a selfie. As López Obrador got up to oblige them, he
said, “This country has its personalities—but Donald Trump!” He raised
his eyebrows in disbelief, and, with a laugh, hit the table with both
hands.

Early in Trump’s term, López Obrador presented himself as
an antagonist; along with his condemnatory speeches, he filed a
complaint at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in
Washington, D.C., protesting the Administration’s border wall and its
immigration policy. When I mentioned the wall to him, he smiled
scornfully and said, “If he goes ahead with it, we will go to the U.N.
to denounce it as a human-rights violation.” But he added that he had
come to understand, from watching Trump, that it was “not prudent to
take him on directly.”

On the campaign trail, he has generally
resisted grand gestures. Not long before the speech in Gómez Palacio,
Trump sent National Guard troops to the Mexican border. López Obrador
suggested an almost pacifist response: “We’ll organize a demonstration
along the entire length of the border—a political protest, all dressed
in white!”

Mostly, López Obrador has offered calls for mutual
respect. “We will not rule out the possibility of convincing Donald
Trump just how wrong his foreign policy, and particularly his
contemptuous attitude toward Mexico, have been,” he said in Ciudad
Juárez. “Neither Mexico nor its people will be a piñata for any foreign
power.” Offstage, he suggested that it was morally necessary to restrain
Trump’s isolationist tendencies. “The United States can’t become a
ghetto,” he said. “It would be a monumental absurdity.” He said that he
hoped to be able to negotiate a new rapport with Trump. When I expressed
skepticism, he pointed to Trump’s fluctuating comments about the North
Korean leader, Kim Jong Un:
“It shows that his positions aren’t irreducible ones, but made for
appearances’ sake.” Behind the scenes, López Obrador’s aides have
reached out to counterparts in the Trump Administration, trying to
establish working relationships.

A more aggressive position would
give López Obrador little advantage over his opponents in the campaign.
When I asked Jorge Guajardo, the former Ambassador, what role Trump had
at this point in the election, he said, “Zero. And for a very simple
reason—everyone in Mexico opposes him equally.” In office, though, he
could find that it is in his interest to present more forceful
resistance. “Look at what happened to those leaders who right away tried
to make nice with Trump,” Guajardo said. “Macron, Merkel, Peña Nieto,
and Abe—they’ve all lost out. But look at Kim Jong Un! Trump seems to
like those who reject him. And I think the same scenario will apply to
Andrés Manuel.”

In campaign events, López Obrador speaks often of
mexicanismo—a way of saying “Mexico first.” Observers of the region say
that, when the two countries’ interests compete, he is likely to look
inward. Mexico’s armed forces and law enforcement have often had to be
persuaded to coöperate with the United States, and he will probably be
less willing to pressure them. The U.S. lobbied Peña Nieto,
successfully, to harden Mexico’s southern border against the flow of
Central American migrants. López Obrador has announced that he will
instead move immigration headquarters to Tijuana, in the north. “The
Americans want us to put it on the southern border with Guatemala, so
that we will do their dirty work for them,” he said. “No, we’ll put it
here, so we can look after our immigrants.” Regional officials fear that
Trump is preparing to pull out of NAFTA. López Obrador, who has often
called for greater self-sufficiency, might be happy to let it go. In the
speech that launched his campaign, he said that he hoped to develop the
country’s potential so that “no threat, no wall, no bullying attitude
from any foreign government, will ever stop us from being happy in our
own fatherland.”

Even if López Obrador is inclined to build a
closer relationship, the pressures from both inside and outside the
country may prevent it. “You can’t be the President of Mexico and have a
pragmatic relationship with Trump—it’s a contradiction in terms,”
González said. “Until now, Mexico has been predictable, and Trump has
been the one providing the surprises. I think it’s now going to be AMLO
who provides the surprise factor.”

One morning in Parral, the
city where Pancho Villa died, López Obrador and I had breakfast as he
prepared for a speech in the plaza. He acknowledged that the
transformation Villa helped bring about had been bloody, but he was
confident that the transformation he himself was proposing would be
peaceful. “I am sending messages of tranquillity, and I am going to
continue to do so,” he said. “And, quite apart from my differences with
Trump, I have treated him with respect.”

I told him that many
Mexicans wondered whether he had moderated his early radical beliefs.
“No,” he said. “I’ve always thought the same way. But I act according to
the circumstances. We have proposed an orderly change, and our strategy
seems to have worked. There is less fear now. More middle-class people
have come on board, not only the poor, and there are businesspeople,
too.”

There are limits to López Obrador’s inclusiveness. Many
young metropolitan Mexicans are wary of what they see as his lack of
enthusiasm for contemporary identity politics. I asked if he been able
to change their minds. “Not much,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Look, in
this world there are those who give more importance to politics of the
moment—identity, gender, ecology, animals. And there’s another camp,
which is not the majority, but which is more important, which is the
struggle for equal rights, and that’s the camp I subscribe to. In the
other camp, you can spend your life criticizing, questioning, and
administering the tragedy without ever proposing the transformation of
the regime.”

López Obrador sometimes says that he wants to be
regarded as a leader of the stature of Benito Juárez. I asked if he
really believed that he could remake the country in such a historic way.
“Yes,” he replied. He looked at me directly. “Yes, yes. We are going to
make history, I am clear about that. I know that when one is a
candidate one sometimes says things and makes promises that can’t be
fulfilled—not because one doesn’t want to but because of the
circumstances. But I think I can confront the circumstances and fulfill
those promises.”

This is the message that excites his supporters
and worries his opponents: a promise to transform the country without
disrupting it. I thought about a speech he gave one night in Ciudad
Cuauhtémoc, a neglected-looking mining town surrounded by mountains.
Ciudad Cuauhtémoc was remote from most of Mexico’s citizens, but people
there felt the same frustrations with corruption and economic predation.
The area was dominated by drug cartels, according to López Obrador’s
aides, and the economy was troubled. A local MORENA leader spoke with
frustration about “foreign mining companies exploiting the treasures
under our soil.”

The audience was full of cowboys wearing hats
and boots; a group of indigenous Tarahumara women stood to one side,
wearing traditional embroidered dresses. López Obrador seemed at home
there, and his speech was angrier and less guarded than usual. He
promised his listeners a “radical revolution,” one that would give them
the country they wanted. “ ‘Radical’ comes from the word ‘roots,’ ” he
said. “And we’re going to pull this corrupt regime out by its roots.” ♦